Watching Struggle Street has been an uncomfortable experience. As it was meant to be, and as it should be. It provides stark representations of poverty, drug addiction, physical and mental ill-health, family breakdown and the difficulties faced by particular individuals and families in the heart of our largest city. It’s been easy to become caught up in the vortex of emotions that began swirling around the program before we had seen any more of it than the promo. It has been difficult to decide when and how to write about it, and there has been much intelligent discussion about it during the last two weeks from people who live in Mt Druitt as well as outside commentators.

Even after the double screening of episodes two and three, which SBS promised would resolve widespread concerns about the first episode, there seems to be no consensus across social and mainstream media, except perhaps about the voiceover (which like many others I found both grating and patronizing). People who have criticized the show have been accused of lacking empathy and compassion, while people who are overwhelmed by emotion and horror have been positioned as middleclass voyeurs from the ‘eastern’ edges of the great urban sprawl. What does seem to be consistent is that many residents of Mount Druitt, in particular those individuals and organizations that were portrayed in the series, do feel profoundly misrepresented and reduced for the purposes of ‘drama’.

One of the problems with postcode poverty is the stigmatization of one particular area as the container of all these issues. As many people have noted, drug abuse, poverty and ill-health are widespread in contemporary Australia. And there are, without doubt, geographic pockets of endemic poverty and community vulnerability (or wide swathes if we turn to regional and rural Australia). However Struggle Street (Series 1, postcode 2770) does not tell us that. The problems begin for me from its opening sequence where the camera hovers over the tourist icons of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge (Voiceover: “Sparkling Sydney Harbour, gateway to a sun-bronzed Aussie lifestyle”), then zooms at rapid speed through tunnels and down highways (Sound effects: car engine, screaming rubber of tires on bitumen, brakes), and comes to a screeching stop at the sign “Mt Druitt: 45 Kms west of Sydney”.

The scene then cuts in rapid succession through the exterior of a graffiti covered fibro house, a disheveled interior (Off-screen dialogue young woman: ‘It’s just been trashed’), a tattooed torso, an arrest in the mall, and a mid-shot of man holding up a small bag of drugs (dialogue: ‘This is the shit is going to get us smashed”), a verandah with two men, one of them angry shouting and pointing his finger off screen (dialogue: “If anyone gives any of my kids any fucking drugs I’m going to tear them to fucking pieces, I don’t give a fuck if he’s a bikie, I don’t give a fuck if he’s God”), cut to a worried-looking teenage girl listening to the shouting, cut to man in the street leaning on a red car, holding a stubby of beer, wearing a “Drink Sensibly’ T-shirt. We are reeling already at the horrors of Mount Druitt and that is only the first 35 seconds of three hours of program extracted from the hundreds of thousands of hours of footage gathered over the six months that some residents of Mount Druitt were stalked by cameras. We find out the names and some of the stories of these people as the program unfolds but the relentless pace does not let up. Just to use this opening as an example, there is no way of entering the documentary without being separated from Mount Druitt and the people we see there. They are irrevocably ‘other’ to we viewers, who are from the first second of the filming positioned – by the commentary, the images and the editing – as tourists in the western suburbs.

Mount Druitt of course has long been the go-to place for media stereotyping of the western suburbs, which the film-makers would have known if they had any history in this country. But this seems to be an English import made by KEO Films ‘Australia’. The formula was honed in their UK series Skint: a postcode, poverty, key characters who are multiply disadvantaged and colourful visually and in their language, which is translated with subtitles, even when they are speaking English (see Skint Season 3, Episode 3 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeZmaEidAJk l) Some of the scripting seems remarkably similar, though oddly, in comparison to Struggle Street, the narrator of Skint Series 3 uses ‘we’ occasionally in the script as he talks about the unemployed, homeless and criminal residents of Merthyr Tydfil, the Welsh former coalmining town that is the focus of Series 3. What seems to be avoided in Struggle Street is any reference to social policy and the responsibilities of governments and the wider society to our fellow citizens. There is no consideration or possibility of social policy as a factor that might be mobilized to address endemic poverty. A couple of small-scale community organizations are depicted but these too are portrayed as shambolic and ineffective (and as QANDA revealed, they are already at risk of losing their funding).

In Struggle Street, as in Skint, it’s all up to you and the decisions that you make as an individual and a family about your life. Wrong decisions lead to bad outcomes, and all we see in Struggle Street are wrong decisions, or decisions that seem to be doomed or that come too late. There isn’t any sense of the multiple supports and resources and the careful case management and participatory approaches that might make a difference in addressing youth mental ill-health, methamphetamine and heroin addiction and many other issues that pile up in Struggle Street.

There is some empathy here and there, in the story arc and in individual scenes, and we know that the characters want their lives to turn around but there is little indication of how this might be achieved. Their own attempts to do things differently are most often portrayed as failures. In the final episode, even the weather conspires to ruin the community event that one character has been working on, and the birthday party surprise is ruined when one of the guests comes around during the preparations. We do see lots of love but this is wrapped in a condescending package that mocks rather than respects the people who gave their stories and their time to the KEO camera people and interviewers.

The ethics of representation and informed consent (versus the blanket ‘waivers’) in this program, or in the ‘realist documentary’ form that SBS claimed for Struggle Street, are worthy of much greater attention. The promo material for Struggle Street claims that it is ‘fly on the wall observational documentary’, that it ‘gives a voice to those doing it tough’ and that it is ‘raw, honest and unfiltered’. By now it is clear to all involved that, like all television, no matter what the pitch from KEO films was at the beginning, it is a carefully constructed and artfully edited text with the intention of sensationalizing disadvantage.

Arguably, the most vulnerable in the community have been made more vulnerable through their engagement with Struggle Street. Even if it isn’t conventional, as SBS’s content manager claimed, it’s worth considering how the program might have been different if there had been a more participatory approach. Why not have community meetings or consultations through the process of film making and editing? Why not provide opportunities for deepening the conversations around poverty and ill-health and how these are experienced by people, why not give them a voice in richer ways than we have seen? Wouldn’t it have been interesting if there had been some media training made available to young people from this area of high unemployment, for example internships might have been embedded into the large Screen Australia grant that funded the project (as scholarships are in large ARC research grants)?

Where is the additional programming from SBS that nuances the arguments – like the post-program panel of participants and advocates from Go back to where you came from? What about talking to the school principals, vocational and alternative education providers about the opportunities that are being made available and the further investment in human capital and potential that is still required? Where are the politicians, beyond the mayor who is such an obvious champion of the beleaguered people in his electorate?

And it is beholden on SBS I think, when they get over their excitement about their high ratings, to go back and speak to the people of Mount Druitt again about the inadvertent impacts of the program on the people who were its subjects and to ask what they can do for the community that, in some ways, it has savaged. It might look at its own ethical guidelines, the agreements it makes as it outsources its programming, and most importantly, the promises it makes to its participants in its programming.

In this instance, the ‘Six million stories and counting’ that used to be SBS’s slogan seems to be reduced to one overarching story, the same old story that has been told again and again and again of this part of the city. For some of the other stories of Mount Druitt and of living on Struggle Street, I recommend starting at the following links:

She is also a Board member of Westwords: The Western Sydney Young People’s Literature Development Project which aims to celebrate the diverse stories of young people and communities in western Sydney http://westwords.com.au

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One subject I teach through the School of Education at UWS is Learning and Creativity, a Social Ecology unit undertaken by many pre-service teachers (about 250 each semester). It introduces students to engaged learning through creative pedagogies and instills how to be a creative teacher in all aspects of the curriculum. I happened to be taking an absent, sick tutor’s class just a week or so before a major creative piece of work was due. A young man with shining eyes stayed behind to ask me whether or not he was on track with his assignment.

His plan, as he explained to me, was to demonstrate to the class the impact of an intense learning experience he had gone through just a year or so earlier. It was learning the Koran off by heart. He told me it took him 3 years to memorise all the words of this ancient text, which also demanded knowing the meaning of every word written. Scholars had come to Sydney to conduct this teaching and it was every day for three years that he studied so intently. He showed me the Koran itself, in its exquisite detailed calligraphy, and demonstrated the process of his learning right from the beginning. He had learnt a page a day, line by line, then progressing to paragraph by paragraph. Within a very short time, he was able to put together and repeat a grouping of 3 paragraphs and so on, up to a whole page, then several pages. Each day began a series of new pages, but first with a testing of the previous day’s learning.

I was astounded by this singular feat of learning off by heart, since I can hardly recall the names of my current students in class, let alone the poems and songs of my childhood!

It made me think about the ‘noble art’ of rote learning and its fall from favour as a teaching strategy. When I was in primary school, the times tables in Maths were an absolute fixture of everyday lessons and the whole class would chant it out together like a mantra being exhorted by a pulsing fervent crowd. Alas, no real fervour here in class, just the terror of being caught out in not knowing the answer to 6×8! I must say, it had some sort of appeal to me then, even in its hollow recitation. There was definitely a rhythm to the sing-songy learning which most of us seemed to enjoy once we had it mastered. Of course, there were some who never managed to master it, despite the threats…!

Then I think back to my crazy High School French teacher, who fired herself into every class with a barrage of language. We would sit mute as the French words flowed from her into a fertile field of unknowing. She loved us to repeat out loud, after her, all our vocab for the day. Yes, vocab for the day, at least 10 words that she would duly test us on the very next lesson. This may not seem so unusual, to call upon rote learning in the acquisition of a new language, but somehow I think it had more to do with learning off by heart as her particular ‘je ne sais crois’! Did we learn via this method? We surely did, but was it again, more through fear, or the power of rote?

Perhaps I imbued some of these now archaic techniques in my own pedagogical practices unknowingly. A particularly difficult 9F Geography class (no, ‘F’ was not the teacher’s surname but the lowest level of streamed classes), convinced of their ineptitude for anything scholarly, and backed up by most teaching staff, had me confounded when I tried to get them to study the geography of Japan. Of course, first up, you have to know the names of the islands of Japan. Impossible! No matter what I tried, no recall. Blank wall! I finally, in sheer desperation, resorted to something familiar. Get a chant and a rhythm going:

And off we went stomping around the class, around and around with these words becoming familiars amidst much hilarity and stupidity. But they got it! And it stayed with them. Fixed in embodied learning that rarely disappears. Maybe hidden, but there to be plucked at some future time.

So I think it is time to take a long hard look at some of these Western educational outdated methods and reconsider if we have thrown the baby out with the bath water. Is there no place for honing our memory through ongoing recitation? And what about poetry known and recited out loud? Children’s nursery rhymes that form a strong basis of literacy?

The lost art of learning off by heart… Now why was it called that? What has the heart to do with this process of memorizing?

The young man with shining eyes told me why he wanted to do this feat of memorising. The desire had been with him as a young kid, when first shown the Koran. He just knew he wanted to do it, for his love of God. As strong then as it was twenty or more years later when he finally achieved his dream. Now, he was learning through his heart. And with his heart.

I do know that in an embryo, when the organs are early developing, the heart and the ear lie close together, before the ear finally migrates to the top of the body, which becomes the head. So for some time, the intimacy between head and heart creates a template of relationship that may be remembered each time the word is spoken aloud to the heart.

The shining man cannot rest on his laurels once the deed has been accomplished, the total memorization of the Koran. He must one day a month go through that huge chunk of the Koran in total, to test his memory, to say it out loud, going over and over it for the rest of his life.

This, surely, is learning off by heart! Not all learning systems threw rote learning out, for good reason.

I am off to brush up on some poems, long ago learnt and forgotten. How hard can that be? And then after that, I’ll tackle the names of all my students…!!